Hunting for a scalar glueball in exclusive B decays

Using flavor SU(3) symmetry for the light quarks validated by the available experimental data, we propose an intuitive way to hunt for a scalar glueball in B decays. In the presence of mixing between the glueball and ordinary scalar mesons, we explore the extraction of the mixing parameters. In particular, we discuss the implication from the recently available experimental data and show the sensitivities of B decays as a probe to the scalar structures. The future Super KEKB factory would allow access to establishing the mixing pattern among the scalars, and possibly allow one to disentangle the long-standing puzzle concerning the existence and mixings of the scalar glueball predicted by QCD.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Dryland maize yields and water use efficiency in response to tillage and nutrient management practices in China

Rainfed crop production in northern China is constrained by low and variable rainfall. This study explored the effects of tillage and nutrient management practices on maize (Zea mays L.) yield and water use efficiency (WUE), at Shouyang Dryland Farming Experimental Station in northern China during 2003-2008. The experiment was set-up using a split-plot design with 3 tillage methods as main treatments: conventional, reduced (till with crop residue incoperated in fall but no-till in spring), and no-till. Sub-treatments were 3 NP fertilizer rates: 105-46, 179-78 and 210-92 kg N and P ha. -1 Maize grain yields were greatly influenced by the amount of growing season rainfall, and by soil water contents at sowing. Mean grain yields over the 6-year period in response to tillage treatments were 5604, 5347 and 5185 kg ha, under reduced, no-till and conventional tillage, respectively. Mean WUE was 13.7, 13.6 and 12.6 kg ha mm under reduced, no-till, and conventional tillage, respectively. Mean soil water contents at sowing and at harvest were significantly influenced by tillage treatments. At harvest time, the no-till treatment had ~8-12% more water in the soil than the conventional and reduced tillage treatments. Under conventional tillage, grain yields increased with NP fertilizer application rates. However, under reduced tillage, grain yields were highest with lowest NP fertilizer application rate. In conclusion, grain yields and WUE were highest under reduced tillage at modest NP fertilizer application rates of 105 kg N and 46 kg P per ha. No-till increased soil water storage by 8-12% and improved WUE compared to conventional tillage

Unpaired Image Captioning via Scene Graph Alignments

Most of current image captioning models heavily rely on paired image-caption datasets. However, getting large scale image-caption paired data is labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we present a scene graph-based approach for unpaired image captioning. Our framework comprises an image scene graph generator, a sentence scene graph generator, a scene graph encoder, and a sentence decoder. Specifically, we first train the scene graph encoder and the sentence decoder on the text modality. To align the scene graphs between images and sentences, we propose an unsupervised feature alignment method that maps the scene graph features from the image to the sentence modality. Experimental results show that our proposed model can generate quite promising results without using any image-caption training pairs, outperforming existing methods by a wide margin.Comment: Accepted in ICCV 201

A citation-based review of study on image retrieval

Driven by the development of the information retrieval technologies, image retrieval has been studied for more than several decades. This study centers on revealing the current status and future directions of image retrieval based on reviewing previous related studies. The citation-based analysis was applied to 2243 articles retrieved from Web of Science database. The time series plots of the citation relationships between the retrieved articles reveal a fundamental research article that lay the foundation for the image retrieval field. Co-citation analysis identifies that the existing studies formed two clusters. Each cluster represents one of the two major areas in the field of image retrieval: the text-based image retrieval and the content-based image retrieval. The visualization map shows that the research of content-based image retrieval has received more attention than the area of text-based image retrieval. Relevance feedback was identified as a promising research direction for the future study